Thomson Reuters Hub looks the business

Yesterday's announcement from Thomson Reuters about their partnerships with Cisco's Jabber XCP, IBM Lotus' Sametime and Microsoft's LCS/OCS can only be termed exciting. The hub connection solution is going to provide financial services with a viable approach to the disparate data problems afflicting the industry for decades.

The hub enables cross platform communication across proprietary instant messaging systems and this has to be what finance services and the corporate have been waiting for! The hub could bring the financial services firm and their corporate customers closer together and be a building block to solve some of the information barriers highlighted by the financial crisis. Credit information and details concerning complex derivatives and OTC could all use the hub to increase management control and of course reduce risks.

Users connected to the hub will be listed on intercompany community directories, which should produce greater levels of integrated information and improve control and security within an enterprise but also with customers and counterparties.

Although probably falling short of totally replacing email it does bring much needed structure into enterprise communication. Could this be developed further to carry ISO messages linking corporate customers with their financial services supplier? If so how much further would it be for this partnership to produce a cheaper more efficient and viable alternative to SWIFT?

Now I am not saying this is in the minds of this partnership but it certainly crosses mine.